Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Vilosell, Flor de Vetus, and Frontaura: The Spanish Vinquisition!

Last week, at a tasting with Seattle’s A&B Imports, I had one of those…Moments – or maybe an epiphany or a Thing; whatever you want to call it – in which time and space tilt sideways a bit and the world as we know it (this is the world of wine we’re talking about, here) no longer makes sense.

As Americans, and especially as Californians or Oregonians or Washingtonians, we’re getting used to an idea or preconception that is actually a delusion, at least as applied to those bottles of fermented grape juice about which we erect complicated fantasies and bestow titles like “genius” on the makers thereof: That You Get What You Pay For.

In cars, watches, houses, widgets, 3/8″ reversing drills, corsets, jumper cables, and lawn mowers, maybe there’s a core Truth to that. In matters of taste and aesthetics, that idea imposes crass limitations on our thinking that, frankly, cause a lot of us to dismiss out-of-hand some products that would bring us a lot of enjoyment, if only we were willing to find out about them.

I’ve written this here several times in the brief history of The Pour Fool but it bears regular repetition:

If you never believe another word that’s written here, Believe This: There is absolutely NO correlation between a bottle of wine and its price tag. NONE.

I’ve tasted – recently, and many times in the past – celebrated, critical-darling, $100+ bottles of wine that were either meh-inducing or outright unpleasant and I’ve had ten-buck (or less!) bottles that left me weak-kneed and searching for adjectives. And no wines in the world do that more often or with more aesthetic and emotional impact that those from Spain.

At A&B’s offices in the Sodo District of Seattle, I sat and tasted about 20 wines, about 80% of which would be among the best I’ve tried this year in their categories. But there were four clear stand-outs:

Here’s the thing…I’m sorry, “The Thing“: I taste pretty much an ocean of wines every year and, given my geographic situation, a large percentage of that is Washington-made. I am, believe me, thrilled and delighted to be living in this state, at this moment in its Wine Evolution. We are absolutely and without doubt, standing right smack on the threshold of a Golden Era of greatness the likes of which the world, with NO exaggeration, has ever seen. But, even today, when we’re not quite there, I watch my fellow Washingtonians, surrounded by good wines, blithely dismiss anything but Washington wine, settling for bottles that are merely good, while transcendent juice sits on wine shop shelves, totally overlooked.

We’re hardly the only region in which this happens but, in ANY region of any country, if there’s a bottle of one of the aforementioned wines on the shelf and you buy almost anything around it, you just settled for a lesser wine – and probably paid more.

I’m going to start with the two gorgeous new wines from Bodegas del Palacio de los Frontaura y Victoria – which we’re gonna call “Frontaura”, because I’m sick of typing all that – two dazzling Ribera del Duero editions – both 100% Tempranillo, that are vinified differently and come from vintages five full years apart.

The Frontaura 2010 Cosecha is a young wine that doesn’t taste like it. Normally, in young reds, you expect some excessive tannins – that “lip stuck to teeth” sensation – and some very zingy acidity. Somehow, shockingly, there’s none of either in this wine. The tannins are supple and unobtrusive and the acid adds a light edge of crispness that does nothing to undercut what is a truly amazing depth and richness. It smells and tastes like textbook, classic Ribera del Duero Tempranillo: black currants, black pepper, black cherry, black coffee – sensing a theme? – grilled bread, licorice, and chocolate. It shows extraordinary balance and finesse for a wine that basically not even a year old. It’s retailing for around $20 and is worth a lot more. 91 Points

Frontaura Crianza 2005 is the older brother of that strappin’ Cosecha and acts like it. This is an unbelievably smooth, polished, replete, perfectly-made wine; a bottle that will stand up with anything from anywhere in its price category. Where the Cosecha is lively, the Crianza is stately, nearly perfect, in many ways. What do we want in a truly great wine? Balance, glorious fruit, structure, complexity, and more than a few grace notes, some terroir showing prettily. All that is in this bottle. The flavors are similar to the Cosecha but deeper, darker, more concentrated and emphatic. The currant flavor is dominant but blackberries and blueberries shout out their presence and the finish spawns even more flavors: graphite, Kirsch, leather, cassis, Black Amber plums, dark chocolate, anise, white pepper, sumac, and violets. The character of this wine is that of a fully-realized Brunello: warm, silken, and amazingly balanced. Just flat-out great wine that’s gonna run ya about $28 – $30 – or less than what you’d pay for most non-ready Washington wines. 93 points

A company called Grupo Artevino makes four different lines of wine, with one given over to Vetus, a massive Tempranillo reserva from the emerging Toro region and its little brother, “Flor de Vetus” Vino de Finca Toro 2009. “Flor” – a Spanish word (flower”) usually means an offshoot or second label of a more prestigious wine – as in the second bottling of Peter Sisseck’s legendary “Pingus”, called “Flor de Pingus”. As with the Pingus, this “flower” is no sort of shy daisy. This is a big, brawny, happy, sunny bottle of emphatic flavors that screams “serious” and “cellar-worthy” from the moment the cork is pulled. The structure of this wine is absolutely flawless. It’s big but graceful, deep but not ponderous, complex but still flatly delicious if, unlike most wine-weenies like myself, you don’t get a kick out of dissecting wines like pickled frogs and just want something great to drink. If you do dissect, analyze, and evaluate, you could easily be at it all day with this stuff. In terms of sheer complexity, it’s a veritable Rubik’s Cube, differential calculus, and fractal graphics rolled into one mouth-watering package. The core flavors run to berry pie, grilled bread, sea salt, black pepper, espresso, mocha, cola, blackberries, currants, woodsmoke, and cherries. It should age for a good 8 – 10 years but drinks beautifully right now. This is one of Spain’s most accomplished obscure gems. 93 Points

Of all these wines I tasted, though, the most endearing, enjoyable, frankly delicious, and fully-realized is the staggering Tomas Cusine “Vilosell” 2008, a wine from a formerly-obscure region called Costers del Segre, located about 75 miles due west of Barcelona. Named for the town of El Vilosell, where the contributing vineyards are located, Vilosell is simply one of the most astonishingly drinkable, graceful, balanced, and interesting wines I’ve ever tasted. At its price – typically $15 to $18 – this is, in my opinion, one of the finest wine bargains – rivalled only by Palacios Remondo “La Montesa” Rioja – that I’ve come across in my 20 years as a wine writer. I don’t want to oversell this stuff (may already be too late, I suppose) but this is one of those magical wines that, for me, is the thing that keeps me both absorbed and engrossed in the juice after years of tasting everything under the sun. The sense of discovery, that sensation that tells you that what’s in your mouth is simply on another plane from all that other stuff you’ve tasted, is what drives my love of The Grape, and this wine delivered that little dose of The Magic in spades.

It’s a blend of 43% Tempranillo, 18% Syrah, 16% Cabernet Sauvignon, 14 % Merlot, 6% Carinyena & 3% Garnacha, and each one of these grapes is identifiable in the finished wine. It spent nine months in new French barrels before bottling and was then further bottle-aged. The range of flavors here is mind-boggling. It’s fruity but shows dozens of terroir notes. It’s refined and sophisticated but earthy, chewy, and surprisingly down-home. It’s stately but sunny and happy and fun to drink. I’m not really sure if this wine would be in my Top Five favorite All-Time Wines – lately that sort of list-making of wines seems more and more pointless to me – but if I expanded it to Top Ten, I couldn’t possibly leave it out. I don’t honestly know where to start in listing flavors. Almost everything I mentioned in the other four is present here, led by a core of solid, haunting black cherries, blackberry, leather, lanolin, coffee, and chocolate. Spices, loam, sand, sweet herbs, smoke, graphite, gunpowder, and peppercorns also figure in. At this writing, A&B’s relationship with Tomas Cusine is coming to an end, so if you want this, find it NOW, as a lapse in market presence frequently accompanies such moves. Just writing about this make me want to taste it again. That’s how good this wine really is! 94 Points

If you’re not a fan of Spanish wines – if you entertain one of those irrational prejudices about big fruit, sanitation, weird grapes, or any one of the other handful of misperceptions about Spain’s wine culture – I submit that you either haven’t tasted widely in Spain or you took the word of some wine prig whose Bordeaux/Burgundy fetish leads then to disdain anything not properly “anointed”. It is categorically impossible to taste through Spain’s myriad, snowflake-discrete offerings and not fall in love with something – usually several dozen somethings. These are just four of the Little Spanish Miracles you can find – especially at shops that specialize in them, like Pike Market’s fantastic Spanish Table – with even the most cursory search and tasting. TRY THESE WINES. If you have an open mind and working taste buds, they’re gonna change your life.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.